Selfie Waves

[Music]

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. On July 1st of 2015, a long-standing ban was lifted. Visitors were finally allowed to take selfies at the White House. This is the first legal selfie ever taken on a White House tour. But a year before the ban was lifted, in February of 2014, I met with the president and secretly took an illegal selfie while on the toilet. Thanks, Obama!

Why am I admitting to this crime now? Well, it's time for the truth. Who took the first selfie, really? Few people would call this a selfie, but it is the oldest known self-portrait, a depiction someone made of themself that includes head and shoulders. It was sculpted more than three thousand years ago by Pharaoh Akhenaten's first Chief Royal Sculptor, a guy named Beck, next to himself. Beck sculpted his wife, too, Heart, making this also a contender for oldest known asy.

But the roots of the selfie go back further than this. We have been making things that resemble ourselves, in whole or in part, intentionally or not, for as long as there’s been cause and effect. Just looking into a pool of water creates a kind of selfie. A primitive, ephemeral one that you can't preserve or send to anyone, but it is undeniably an image of the self made by the self.

Even the earliest life forms on Earth were capable, to some degree, of self-discrimination. They could differentiate themselves from the environment around them; they have inside them, in some chemical form, a crude pre-conscious sense of themselves. I call things like that a first wave selfie. First wave selfies are unintentional, automatic, or accidental resemblances something makes of itself in whole or in part. Like prehistoric human footprints or the mental images animals have of their own bodies.

The first big leap in selfie history, the second wave, began with the first intentional depictions of oneself. Second wave selfies include everything from Chauvet caves' 32,000-year-old hand stencil prints to the paintings of Jan Van Eyck and Judith Leyster. But in the 19th century, self-depiction changed in another major way. A technology emerged that allowed likenesses of the self to be made faster and with less skill, that seemed more accurate, less mediated, and more indexical than ever before. Photography ushered in the third wave selfie.

In the fall of 1839, outside his family's lamp and chandelier store in Philadelphia, thirty-year-old Robert Cornelius stood completely still for about 15 minutes in front of a camera he built using a modified opera glass and a sheet of silver-plated copper. The result was a significant image; it could be found on his gravestone in Philadelphia's Laurel Hill Cemetery. The Smithsonian calls it the first selfie. But they also don't.

In that same fall of 1839, a man named Henry Fitz Jr. took a photograph of himself in Baltimore. Smithsonian Magazine and pretty much everyone else has called Cornelius's selfie the first, but in their archives, the Smithsonian calls Fitz Jr.'s the first. The reason for this confusion is that, honestly, we don't know which of these came first. All we can be sure of is that neither of them is the first.

Equally, a Frenchman wrote of taking a photo of himself in 1837, two years before these, but it's been lost. Other even earlier examples may have been lost as well. Because these are photographs people took of themselves, it's largely uncontroversial to call them selfies, but you know they're not like selfie selfies. If you've seen my video “Is Cereal Soup?”, you know what I just did there—contrastive focus reduplication. That's when you repeat a word in order to focus on prototypical examples in contrast to edge cases.

For example, we went on a date last night, but you know it wasn't a date date. In that statement, I'm contrasting what I did last night, which might have been a date, to a true date date, which is obviously a date. Okay, anyway, the point is, no one called these selfies when they were taken. They were photographic self-portraits. The word selfie wouldn't even exist for another 160 years after they were taken.

So at some point between this and this, our relationship to self-depiction changed, and our vocabulary had to expand to discuss it. What rough beast emerged to make the coining of selfie necessary? Well, let's keep going. Around 1846, Czech photographer MV Lobethal took the earliest known selfie with a mirror. This, of course, would become a classic selfie technique. Mirrors provided an easy early way to capture the self with a camera.

But in my opinion, this mirror selfie from around 1900 is the most arresting. I think you die at least three times: once when your body stops living, again usually sometime later when your name is spoken for the last time. But now, thanks to photography, more and more of us are able to save ourselves from the third, the last time an image of you is seen.

The identity of this woman is unknown. That makes it the oldest known selfie taken by a person whose name we have forgotten. This is the oldest known example of the classic outstretched arm selfie technique. It was taken by Joseph Byron in 1909. Images like these were a significant step toward the eventual fourth wave selfie.

The presence of a camera, or arms or poles in the shot, evidence of how it was made, are hallmarks of the modern-day selfie stereotype. For example, a 2013 ad campaign for the Cape Times reimagined famous historical photographs as selfies, and in every single one, an arm connecting the subject to the camera was used. Five years after Byron's armed selfie, Anastasia Nikolivna Romanova, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and great-granddaughter to Britain's Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, took this photo of herself.

She was 13 years old at the time, so many have claimed it to be the first selfie ever taken by a teenager, but that's not true. In 1852, 61 years earlier, British chemist William Henry Perkin took this photo of himself when he was just 14. However, even though Anastasia wasn't the first teenager to take a selfie, in another way she was unlike Perkin, whose shot feels like a self-portrait. She took pictures that feel much more like what we today would call selfies.

The photos she took were personal. She sent them to friends to share her mood and daily life. Here she is posing with fake novelty teeth in 1915 or '16. Four years after taking this famous selfie, her camera was confiscated, and not long after, Bolshevik revolutionaries executed her and her entire family together in a basement. Conclusive evidence of her death in 1918 wasn't uncovered until 2007.

Although her work was cut short, she pioneered the use of photography as a social behavior, as a way to communicate, not just commemorate. She has been called the Kardashian of her day, but despite her influence, she was more of a trendsetter for hairstyles than photography. She didn't usher in a worldwide shift in behavior where young people everywhere started taking selfies.

Camera manufacturers didn't rush to make self-portraiture easier, and articles weren't written about how great or how scary it was that young people were taking pictures of themselves. Though the modern-day selfie still wasn't born, it continued to gestate and kick within the womb. One such kick was the use of sticks and poles to activate a camera's shutter.

In 1925, newlyweds Arnold and Helen Hogg used a long pole to take this picture. In 1934, Helmer Larson used a fallen tree branch to snap this selfie with his wife, Naime, in Sweden. On Reddit, Chooch37 shared his grandfather using a selfie stick in the late 1940s. Here's one from 1957. And going back to 1920, here's Joseph Byron taking a handheld photograph with others.

I mentioned this image because a second camera captured how it was taken, giving us an early depiction of what is now the recognizable human selfie pose. Now, what I think makes this image so significant is that it's another early taste of the selfie as we know it today. As Jin's Rushitz pointed out in exploring the selfie, if you Google self-portrait, you get a lot of self-portraits. There's only one image that shows someone making a self-portrait: Norman Rockwell's famous triple self-portrait.

But if you Google selfie, a lot of what you get aren't selfies; they're pictures of people taking selfies. For the selfie as we know it today, the pose of taking one is just as, if not more salient, than the actual result. Blogs and articles containing outrage over people taking selfies in inappropriate places, or when they should be behaving differently, rarely complain about the actual images they dislike—the performance.

In 2015, Joanne Paternapatania published a book of pictures of people taking selfies from which she had removed the environment, giving us what feel like selfie poses preserved in specimen jars. The idea that those taking photos can be a nuisance didn't begin with selfies—far from it. There's a long tradition of photographers, especially tourists, raising eyebrows for being annoying, centering themselves over the location, and being predictably heard, like for example the Pisa pushers found in Italy.

The modern-day selfie that was to come, however, makes a person look like a tourist everywhere they go—not because everything suddenly became a landmark, but because people have always loved looking at themselves. And as cameras became smaller and easier to handle, it was inevitable that people would start snapping more self-portraits. Vivian Dorothy Meyer took really cool mirror selfies in the 1950s and 60s, but she kept them to herself. Her selfies were unknown and unpublished during her lifetime.

A couple of years before her death, she failed to make payments on a storage unit she rented, and her works were auctioned off. Six months after her death in 2009, a collector who had acquired them uploaded her images to Flickr, and they went viral, inspiring exhibitions. A road in Paris was even named after her. The popularization of instant cameras in the 60s and 70s made taking selfies physically and mentally easier. You didn't need to know how to develop the film yourself or feel self-conscious turning in selfies to be developed.

But instant cameras with mirrors on the front didn't come around until decades later. Selfies still hadn't reached a tipping point. In 1969, Michael Collins took the first reverse selfie: a photograph that contains everyone but yourself. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are in this lander right here, and every human living or dead at that time is on this ball of rock. Only Collins himself, behind the lens, is absent.

In 1983, Hiroshi Wada submitted a patent for a telescopic extender for supporting a compact camera—an early selfie stick. Two years prior, Lester Wisbrod started what was to become a personal tradition, using his new auto-focusing compact camera to snap selfies with famous people. Wisbrod was the pioneer of the celebrity selfie. Still, though, no one was using the word selfie. Selfies hadn't become a thing yet.

But then something happened in Japan in 1995. 19-year-old Toshikawa Haromi, known as Hero Mix, was nominated for the new Cosmos of Photography award by world-renowned photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. She submitted a portfolio of snapshots she'd taken of her daily life, and she won the grand prize.

There was already a unique culture of photo diary and photo booth use among young people in Japan, but Hero Mix's sudden fame among teenagers and the educated elite made the practice a thing. Suddenly, young people all over Japan wanted to be like her. The New York Times called it "Hero Mix syndrome." Increased demand for cameras that made self-portraiture and proto-instagramming easier led camera manufacturers to speed up the release of features that served immediate frequent photography.

Hero Mix took a lot of photos—tens of thousands—and her work generated polarized reactions. Some critics adored her, while others found it all baffling. Now, by the time selfies were called selfies, the same debate was started again, but it was about the behavior Hero Mix had brought into focus more than a decade before. You know, it's hard to say who took the first selfie, but in my opinion, Hero Mix took the first selfie selfie. Her work hastened and christened the arrival of the fourth wave selfie—the selfie as we know it today.

Now, if it hadn't been her, it would have been someone else. People love looking at themselves, and it was becoming easier and easier to do so. But Hero Mix popularized taking pictures of yourself as a social sharing activity, more akin to speaking than remembering, less a memory than a message.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the story of the first camera phone picture. On June 11, 1997, while his wife was in labor, Philippe Kahn jerry-rigged together a makeshift system involving his StarTac flip phone, a Casio QV, and a Toshiba laptop. When his daughter was born, he took a photo with the camera and used the laptop and phone connection to immediately email the image to more than 2,000 people.

Social media is strongly associated with the fourth wave selfie, but as we've seen, it wasn't its origin. Instead, social media was simply a mouth that showed up later and demanded to be fed. Online, we have no bodies; we can't just walk in and be seen. We have to upload images of our bodies for them to be there. Selfies are an easy solution because they don't require other people's help.

But on top of that, there's a sense in which a photo of yourself taken by someone else is that person's point of view—it's their story. But a selfie? Well, a selfie’s point of view doesn't belong to another person. When I look at a selfie of you, I'm not a third observer looking at you through someone else's eyes; it's just me looking at you.

Selfies allow us to be online firsthand, not secondhand. In the same way that brown bears, who migrated to the cold lands of the north, evolved pale guard hairs and became polar bears, as humans migrated into the cold lands of the screen, they evolved selfies. By 2006, everyone knew that something was happening. The New York Times published an article that year about how young people were suddenly taking a lot of photos of themselves.

Was it weird? What did it mean? Not once in the article is the word selfie used, but it could have been because sometime between 1995 and 2006, the word selfie was born. Selfie with a Y had been a word since the 1600s; it meant self-centered or selfish. But selfie with an IE is new. The earliest recorded usage of it is from a September 13, 2002 post on Dr. Karl's Self-Serve Science Forum. Australian Nathan Hope uploaded an image he took of how busted up his lip had gotten, and he wrote, "Sorry about the focus; it was a selfie."

Hope has been hailed as the inventor of the word selfie, but says himself that he probably heard it somewhere else first, which is likely. The word selfie is a hypocrism, a pet name, an affectionate, familiar, cuter version of an existing word. Australians are famous for doing this: barbecue, Barbie; mosquito, mozzie; Australian, Aussie; self-portrait, selfie.

They don't only use I.E.; they love O.S. and Z. too. Australian English has given us probs, rando, totes, saws, preggers, and yes, even doggo. Myspace was an early incubator of thriving selfie colonies, but in 2004, when Facebook launched as a serious social media platform for people at elite universities, there was a brief feeling that selfies were falling out of favor.

However, when the iPhone 4 debuted with a front-facing camera in 2010, the selfie was declared officially back. In 2013, usage of the word selfie had jumped 17,000 percent in the last year, and Oxford Dictionaries declared it the word of the year. Everyone knew what a selfie was. We started calling things that existed before the word selfies as well, but that is an anachronym—a word used out of place in time.

Anachronyms can be words that have lingered around too long, like when we say we're dialing a number on a smartphone, even though actual turning dials are no longer involved, or when we call this tinfoil, although it's actually the cheaper and more durable aluminum foil that superseded it. Anachronyms can also be words from today, like selfie, that barge back into the past, like calling these medieval church singers the first boy band.

Nailing down the definition of a selfie in the modern sense is tricky, of course. Does a selfie need to be a photograph? If not, why? If so, do I need to be holding the camera? Does the use of a timer or a drone I’m not even touching mean that it’s not a selfie or just a different kind of selfie? Are humans a selfie since God made us in His image?

Because of questions like that, I prefer what I’ve been doing in this video: just allow a selfie to mean anything that something has made that resembles itself or part of itself. That covers a lot of stuff but can be broken down into four waves. First wave selfies are unintentional. The second wave began with the first deliberate depictions of oneself. The third wave came with photography's promise of recognizable self-depictions that were significantly more accessible. The fourth wave is when selfies became a thing—a cultural phenomenon motivated by a desire not just to have images but to be images.

Throughout the 20th century especially, we found ourselves increasingly surrounded by images—news and travels and products and stories. The entire world outside our head could be seen like never before, not in person but through images. In the midst of this image world was the human animal, an organism that got to look at images but wasn't one. Which was too bad, because to be an image was to be something.

Well, selfies gave us that power. They put it in our own hands. Photography allows more of us than ever before to delay the third death, but the fourth wave selfie flattens the boundaries of time and space. Now we can be anywhere, whenever. Does my face need to be depicted for it to be a selfie? Well, in October of 2013, Kim Kardashian posted this image on Instagram.

Within a month, “belfie” had been added to the Urban Dictionary. A belfie is a selfie of your butt. But selfie, selfie, belfie, guides, and histories, and even a belfie stick soon followed. And this all raises a serious question about society: if a selfie of your butt is called a belfie, shouldn't a selfie of your face be called a filthy?

And as always, thanks for watching.

[Music]

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